1993 Presidential Address: What if the Academy Actually Mattered?

In the spring of this year, Newsweek magazine published an article with the startling title, The Death of (Samuelson, 1993). When I saw it, I groaned to myself, Just my luck. My year as president of the Academy of Management and the whole thing goes belly-up. Actually, it was not as crushing an article as its title implied. It was mainly a rehash of the obvious and well-worn point that someone who succeeds in managing one enterprise will not necessarily do well in another one-that you carn't just parachute in and analyze your way out of any complex managerial dilemma. As if someone said you could. One more straw man skewered. Namely, the article did not exactly deal a fatal blow to our field or its premises. So, as Mark Twain said, news of our death is greatly exaggerated. But it gets one thinking. What if the field of management, or say, specifically the Academny of Management, did die? Which, in turn, gets one thinking, What if the Academy of Management never existed? What if we had no occasion to be here in this room today? To think in these terms is to conjure up Frank Capra's film classic, It's A Wonderful Life. In the movie, Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey, the small-town banker who attempts to end his own life, only to be shown the error of his ways by his guardian angel named Clarence. Clarence's tactic, of course, is to take George Bailey back through time and show him the void that would have occurred if there had been no George Bailey, reminding him of all the lives he's touched and people he's helped-how the world is much better off because he's here. Let me be your guardian angel for a few moments, giving you a glimpse of what might have been if there were no Academy of Management. It will be an unsettling trip. Unlike George Bailey, we will find that things might have worked out very, very well without us. Frankly, I'm not